Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope (Part 7)

SM: What are some of the other shifts in strategy you have had in the company, other than the move from water to food?

DC: Providing solutions throughout the supply chain was very significant. Another was to add an informatics layer to everything we have. The jury is still out on whether I have made the right decisions.

SM: When you are in the sales cycle, how much leverage do you get among products?

DC: That is how we discovered the need for each product, so as we were developing solutions we thought that would give us a lot of leverage. It has turned out to not be the case. Within the organizations we target they are different buyers. I have at least two wonderful teams, but they are completely different.

I have an agriculture chemical heritage team led by a GM who reports to me who has 30 years in the industry. All of his employees are ag-chem specialists, and we sell their preharvest product through distribution. I also have a GM for all my food applications, an area which is post harvest and transportation. Those two lines are completely different businesses.

SM: Sales channels can be very different. It is not always the same economic buyer, even within the same big-name customer.

DC: Having traveled that road has diversified us. We have had quarters where one line did not do well and the other line carried us. My preharvest business took off quickly and funded other activities. Those two lines now are 50/50. I essentially feel like I am running two companies. I file patents and trademarks for two companies.

SM: How are you managing your international business?

DC: If you are in food, you are global from day one. I am used to being in disciplined startups where you work to get scale and expand into different regions with partners. Food is a fungible item. During our winter we get food from the southern hemisphere, in the summer we get it from ours. We get food from the tropics year-round. Consumers expect to get all commodities all year long.

We have global partners and resellers. We also have employees regionally. I have an employee in Chile who handles most of Latin America. I have an employee in Australia who handles Australia and Asia. I have an employee in Ecuador as well as some in Italy, France, and Greece.

SM: Is the food industry an early adapter market, or does it lag?

DC: The food industry is going through a tremendous transformation right now. Not a day goes by that I don’t hear about a safety or quality issue. In the past the industry achieved food safety through the use of chemicals, but now consumers are pushing back. We see laws in Asia and the EU outlawing residual chemicals. Russia stopped import of all U.S. chickens; sales to Russia were 25% of all U.S. chicken sales.

Consumers want safe, fresh foods without chemicals, and it is ripping the entire global food industry in half. The industry is looking for new technologies, but it is risk averse.  It does not want the consumer to know about anything, so it does not even talk about the new technologies it uses.

It is great for businesses like ours as well as our entire category. Our space is being driven by this rupture in the market. This is our market disruption event, and out of all the deals I have been involved with, this is the most fun. The industry lags, but the TAM should offset that because we can become part of their being risk averse.

SM: Thank you for your time. I look forward to following Purfresh.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Cleantech In Food: Purfresh CEO Dave Cope
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